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The artiste's blessed imbecility, "toujours le poète," the best weapon against a regimented military system. The opening unspools under the dizzy aegis of Laurel and Hardy, banana peels on marble floors and torn tuxedos and all: Jean Renoir spills gravy on the Army officer's uniform and throws benzene in the fireplace, then sends the affluent dreamer with a "delicate condition" (Georges Pomiès) and his rambunctious valet (Michel Simon) off to the barracks. Life in the encampment is a bumpy one for the moonstruck poet who saunters over to the practice dummy and shakes its hand after a gentle bayonet poke. In solitary like Gabin in La Grande Illusion, he dodges rodents while outside his fiancée (Jeanne Helbling) is wooed by the roving-eyed lieutenant (Jean Storm). "Prisons are much less pleasant than I had imagined!" The maneuver is a march through the woods with gasmask-wearing soldiers slipping down a hill, the battle is a pillow fight around the butler's girlfriend (Fridette Fatton), both filmed for the benefit of Vigo. (The charming handwritten intertitles are adorned with doodles.) It culminates in slapstick fraternité at the colonel's party, with Pomiès decked out in Pan's pelts and Simon dangling above the stage lights in Sylphian drag while the bully unleashes a foretaste of Tati's fireworks. Renoir concludes with a jubilant stretto out of A Midnight Summer's Dream, a triple wedding where a tracking shot puts master and servant not upstairs and downstairs but side by side. With Félix Oudart, Louis Zellas, and Kinny Dorlay. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |